Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
There are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured. Such capability can, and soon will, be augmented…
Almost a year after the industry outcry over made-for-advertising inventory and months since many ad-tech firms have devised solutions to address the problem, ads from large brands are still being served on spammy websites, new research from Adalytics has found. Adalytics found examples of hundreds of large brands advertising on made-for-advertising websites, facilitated by most…
You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams. People like Dakota Johnson, who have a Hollywood lineage deeper than the Mariana Trench, post only rarely. They post about social justice causes they care about, or personal announcements. Even someone like actress and musician Maya Hawke mostly posts previews of upcoming…
Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline. At HouseFresh, we keep an eye on Google’s news and documentation because these updates can literally make or break…
The Messenger, a news website that pledged to shake up the media industry with a playbook borrowed from the doomed publishing start-ups of yesteryear, will be closing down. In an email to staff, the site’s founder, Jimmy Finkelstein, said that The Messenger’s shutdown was “effective immediately.” “This is truly the last thing I wanted, and…
Programmatic auctions are creating so many carbon copies of themselves, it’s threatening to topple the entire structure of programmatic. The bid duplication is getting so extreme, buyers are starting to take notice of this strange behavior. Instead of seeing the whole universe of bid opportunities, demand-side platforms see only a small portion of inventory copied…
How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. There are those…
Two programs offered in an Evanston, Ill. school district allow for students of color to opt in to “affinity classes” for English and math subjects. In other words, classes can be “Coloreds Only.” As expected, civil rights experts have voiced concerns about what seems like a blatant Brown v. Board of Education violation. LL Cool…
Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials—more documents to leak….
I am not a parent, but I have been a child, and I have friends who are parents, and I know for sure that no parent really knows what they are doing, and that the job is hard. Covid made the job harder, and I have so much empathy for the added stress that parents…